


Keep Us Until the Dawn

by Carmarthen



Category: Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Ancient History, Backstory, Gen, Gods, Other, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-23
Updated: 2011-11-23
Packaged: 2017-10-26 11:16:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/282408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmarthen/pseuds/Carmarthen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is said in the high stony reaches of Ekallatum where none live but goatherds and miners that the Great God Mithros was born in a cave. A slightly AU story of how Mithros might have come to be, and of the fall of Ekallatum, set in the Carthaki equivalent of the Bronze Age. T for Doomed Last Stand violence and character death, although you won't find any canon characters here besides some of the gods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep Us Until the Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a bit AU in places: most notably, I made the people of Ekallatum darker than the "pale" woman in the mosaic Daine sees in the palace in _Emperor Mage_ , gave Ekallatum mountains as well as hyena-containing plains, and posited that Mithros was not always a Great God.

It is said in the high stony reaches of Ekallatum where none live but goatherds and miners that the Great God Mithros was born in a cave.

They do not say this in the other provinces of Carthak, or in the Eastern Lands where Mithros is worshipped in stone temples by orange-robed priests who have never held spear or sword, never felt the hot rush of bull’s blood over their hands in the darkness or prayed for light before battle. In those lands they say that Mithros has always been there at the side of the Goddess, light to her dark, sun to her moon.

In Ekallatum they remember.

* * *

They are not the flower of the Ekallatumite army, Hypatie thinks wearily as she sharpens her bronze spearhead against a stone, the sound of the whetting echoing off the rock walls of the cave where the officers have taken shelter for the night. They are the last battered survivors of a slow massacre, worn down by Thaki slave-soldiers taken from lands once as free as Ekallatum and by Thaki mages and their war-magics, beaten back to this last pass between the Thakic Empire and Damire, the stronghold of the mountains nestled in the flat park between peaks. The grass country is lost already, and the capital city of Etta with its palaces and the labyrinth, gone to fire and smoke, its mosaics smashed and artisans taken in chains. There are no more girls in tiered gowns to dance for the Goddess, no more bull-leaping youths.

Olosun Pass is a narrow place, the walls too steep for any but a mountain goat or sheep, full of treacherous rockfalls and prone to flash floods in spring. It is a good place for a last stand: Hypatie, raised in these parts, knows its every hillock and crevice in her sleep. The Thaki do not know it at all.

Across the cave from her, Nico coughs, a deep rasping cough that brings a flush to his cheeks and makes his eyes burn fever-bright. There’s a sickness among the soldiers, a strange one that their healers cannot touch, and already whispers of Thaki magic spread among the men and women of Ekallatum like their own disease, sapping hope and will as the cough saps strength. Nico was a smith before the war, half-Thaki and built broad and strong like them, but now his bones stand out like a shipwreck under the bronze of his skin.

There is no winning this war, Hypatie knows, only time to be bought, time for the capital to be evacuated and its people to scatter into the hidden valleys of the high meadows, a few more years of freedom.

“We need a god.” Cyrene, Hypatie’s shoulder-to-shoulder woman, stands, the metal fittings of her scabbard ringing softly against the dulled bronze of her breastplate, her greaves catching the firelight. They have all eaten and slept in their armor for days now, not knowing when the Thaki army will reach them. “We need a soldier’s god, a luck-god, a light-bringer.”

Young Apolon, Nico’s shieldbearer, snorts. “The gods have turned their faces from Ekallatum. We have said all the prayers, made all the sacrifices. What is left now?”

“What is left to lose?” says Cyrene, hands on hips. Under her scarlet felt war-cap, sewn with metal rings to turn a sword, the oiled locks of her raven hair flow over her shoulders, and in the firelight she looks like the statue of Sulies Defendant that had stood in the great forum of Etta until the Thaki burned it. The lines around her nose and mouth are deep-graven with exhaustion and worry. “In my grandmother’s day, we sacrificed a bull before battle, to carry its strength into victory.”

“And where shall we find a bull?” asks Nico, exhaustion in every line of his body.

In the end it is one of the shieldbearers who finds the bull for them, some stray from one of the abandoned farmsteads left behind when the farmers moved into the high meadows. The girl is hardly out of her teenage years, leggy as a colt but confident in her woolen tunic and ring-quilted jacket, her dark eyes huge in her oval face. In her gaze is the dreadful hope they all feel, that this thing they do in the cave will mean something.

For a terrible, bitter moment, Hypatie thinks, _This would be a sacrifice such as the gods could not ignore,_ but then the bull makes a low sound and the moment passes. There is no desperation that would justify that.

The bull is white, white as the first flowers of spring peeping through the snow, white as newborn kid-goats, white as the tunic a maiden might weave for her lover. It shines in the dim firelight like something from the Realms of the Gods, like the First Bull.

“It should be you,” says Cyrene, pressing the hilt of a knife into Hypatie’s palm. Her hand is warm and hard and familiar, and Hypatie feels so wearied she wants nothing more than to simply sit down with Cyrene, hand to hand, and rest.

But she stands all the same. The bull stands dully, drugged with the herbs the surgeons use for amputations; there will be little need for the surgeons soon enough. None of them expect to walk out of Olosun Pass.

 _Let there be some god somewhere who hears,_ she thinks, her hand tightening on the hilt of the knife, _some lord of light to see us to the dawn. If you are listening, heed us now._ And she steps forward and cuts, so exhausted that later she only remembers the sound the bull makes as it dies, the hot rush of wine-dark blood over her hands, and the thick smell of it.

Mithros is born there in the darkness of the cave, in the iron-reek of bull’s blood, in desperation and belief.

* * *

A bird calls low in the blooming pink light of dawn and Hypatie stiffens. That is no bird of the rocky heights of Ekallatum, and she nudges Cyrene on her right side, then gives the soft whistle of a rock-lark. The sound spreads through the Ekallatumite ranks quietly, bringing weary soldiers to alertness, hands to spear and sword.

Hypatie had been a bull-leaper in her youth, and in the quiet space before the fight she has always found that same crystal peace, that place of clear thought where fear is set aside and there is only the stark task ahead. Her hand is steady on her spear as she peers into the lightening hills for any sign of movement. The light cannot come fast enough, she thinks. Let the sun rise before the Thaki army is upon them.

And there, below them down the pass a ray of light glints off a helm or sword blade, and now she can see them in the dimness winding their way up the pass in a long column, washed with the warm golden light of the rising sun. Hypatie gives another call, an owl hoot, and it is passed along; above her on the hillside she hears the archers move into place, the soft sound of arrow-fletchings rustling in quivers.

It is not so long before the air is full of arrows and the screams of dying Thaki soldiers--soldiers who might, in a year, be replaced by Ekallatumite conscripts, but Hypatie cannot spare thought for that--and then they are stretched across the narrowest part of the pass together, shoulder-to-shoulder in a shieldwall, Cyrene solid and sturdy to Hypatie’s right, Nico to her left. “ _Lord of Light, keep us until the dawn,_ ” she finds herself murmuring, without knowing from whence the words come. “ _Lord of Light, keep us until the dawn,_ ” she repeats louder, and this time Cyrene and Nico say it also, and then all the rest, until it is a low roar on five hundred pairs of lips. _Lord of Light, teach us to die aright._

The Thaki pause for a bare instant, and Hypatie likes to think she sees fear on their faces, and then they come down like hyenas, their axes and spears flashing, and after that her world narrows to the thrust of her spear, and Cyrene’s shoulder against hers. Behind them the sun rises, and they press forward, cutting the Thaki down like grain as they wince and squint in the light. Out of the corner of her eye Hypatie thinks she sees a strange man in their line, a man with the sun behind him and a shield as brightly gleaming as dawn, but then there is another sword coming towards her, another jarring blow taken on her shield. The sparkling fires of the Thaki war-mages crackle above them, gold and scarlet and purple, ropes of fire reaching out and wrapped around the throats of Ekallatumite soldiers.

They fight into the night, the front rank falling back to rest uneasy and choke down some rations as the back hold the pass, and into the next day.

On the third day Cyrene goes down with an arrow through her throat and an awful strangled cry, but Hypatie keeps fighting, her feet slipping in the gravel of the hillside. “Hold the line!” she screams, her throat raw and aching, but more and more of the Ekallatumite soldiers fall. Nico slips in the mess of someone’s guts and stumbles, crashing to the ground with a Thaki sword piercing his chest.

There is a Thaki spear through her gut and blood in her mouth, and it hurts to breathe. Hypatie is dying, Cyrene’s body already cold against her shoulder, shoulder-to-shoulder woman even in death. She fumbles for Cyrene’s hand, hissing at the pain, but she can’t find it in the dark. She only wants Cyrene’s hand in the dark.

Then someone bends over her, someone shining, and his hand is in hers. He brings the warmth of the summer sun, warmth that pushes away all her pain and weariness as he draws her to her feet.

The god is a slender youth in a tunic as white as the first flowers of spring, his greaves and breastplate shining as the sun, and the sun behind him so that he hurts her eyes to see. He wears a scarlet war-cap like her own, and his oiled locks are as sleek as a raven’s back, his skin the same dusky olive as her own. The blade of his spear shines white-hot. “Come,” he says, in a voice that is gentle and yet vibrates through her very bones, “Come, my soldier.”

Hypatie resists, hanging back. “Was it worth it?”

The god’s fingers brush her cheek, infinite compassion in his eyes. “Three days you bought,” he says. “Three days for Damire. Is that enough?”

Hypatie closes her eyes. “It is enough,” she says, and she lets him draw her away from the battlefield. She does not look back at Cyrene’s body lying there among the rocks. She will see Cyrene again in the Black God’s land, she hopes, and she does not want to remember her cold and broken.

She follows her god, the god they made in the cave with their need and their sacrifice, into the light.

* * *

This is the nature of stories, to remember those most bright and shining at the center of them, to speak only of the chosen band. In time no one remembers the smiths and miners, the goatherds and potters, the shieldbearers and archers, all who took up spear and sling and bow to defend their homeland, but only the Five Hundred who held back the Thaki at Olosun. And so _Remember Olosun!_ is on the lips of every commander forced to sacrifice for time alone, _Remember the Five Hundred at Olosun!_

Only two survive Olosun: Apolon, the shieldbearer to General Nicomakhes, and Eluvie, the farmer’s daughter who found the bull. They speak of a shining god who fought with them in that battle, with the fervor of the god-touched, and the Ekallatumites believe and take fire into the dark.

Ekallatum lasts another five years, fighting with their harsh mountain winters and spring floods as much as with sword or bow.

When it falls at last, when the Thaki take with them the gold of Damire and the children of the city in chains, Mithros too goes with the Thaki war-banners of scarlet and gold and the vultures wheeling above the battlefield. To the victor the spoils: he changes. His shoulders grow broader, his skin darker. His oiled raven locks and scarlet war-cap are gone.

Mithros is a Thaki god now, and he carries Empire with him into the Eastern Lands, until the Thakic Empire extends from the furthest southern reaches to the Roof of the World. And there in the Eastern Lands he remains even when the Thaki withdraw, their grip on their far-flung subjects crumbling. He remains a sun-god, a soldier’s god, although worshipped in stone-built temples by men who have never held a blade. He remains as Carthak rises again, diminished but no less hungry, as if he has always been there at the right hand of the Goddess.

It has been long and long since any sacrificed a white bull to Mithros in the darkness of the cave, but still before every Carthaki battle, on the lips of five hundred olive-skinned men--for the warrior women of Ekallatum are gone, too--there is the murmur, _Mithros, also a soldier, keep us until the dawn. Mithros, also a soldier, teach us to die aright._

And sometimes, sitting in his high seat in the Realms of the Gods, Mithros remembers the dark and the cave and the smell of bull’s blood, and feels something a mortal might call regret.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was born from a number of things:
> 
> 1\. Frustration with how un-Mithraic the Mithros we see in canon is, despite his obvious base in the Mithras cult of our world--a soldier-god worshipped by magic-using priests who live in monasteries? And really, general frustration with how weirdly religion works in the Tortall 'verse.  
> 2\. Curiosity about Ekallatum (which has at least a little Minoan influence, I think, despite being located in fantasy!Africa).  
> 3\. My hypothesis that the collapsed "Thanic Empire" which once encompassed the Eastern Lands was actually an earlier version of the Carthaki empire, perhaps corrupted by scribal error over the centuries from Thakic to Thanic.  
> 4\. A desire for more shieldsisters in fantasy fiction.
> 
> The version of Ekallatum in my head is a bit of Minoa, a bit of Sparta, a bit of India, and lot of fantasy. Canonically, all we know about it is that it's in the far south of Carthak, has grassy plains and hyenas, and at least some of the inhabitants are "pale" and the women wear tiered skirts and high headdresses (o hai Crete). I confess pale people don't make much sense to me in fantasy!Africa, so I chose to ignore that, and I gave Ekallatum some mountains because they're much better for doomed last stands.
> 
> The prayers to Mithros are quoted/paraphrased from Rudyard Kipling's "[A Song to Mithras](http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_mithras.htm)."


End file.
